


Dobby Goes to Canterbury

by potionpen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A Modest Proposal, Essays, House Elves, Meta, Paradigm Shift, Plot Hole Repair, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, i'm not gonna die on this hill but it is absolutely my new headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 15:25:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17164484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potionpen/pseuds/potionpen
Summary: Dobby tells Harry that he enters Our Hero’s story as the brave, downtrodden slave of Lucius Malfoy, a bad master he hates and fears and who treats him very badly.  He looks and behaves as if he is.  Lucius behaves as though Dobby’s story is true.Dobby’s story has enough holes you could fly a Quidditch team through it.





	Dobby Goes to Canterbury

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Profitless fanwork. See tags.
> 
> This was originally intended to be a few paragraphs of Author's Notes for chapter 14 in the Autumn-1980 volume of my story Valley of the Shadow. Once I started, I realized I had to take it more seriously than that. Link back to the relevant chapter in the end-notes.
> 
> Thanks to plutoplex for betaing blind. Also thanks to [my brother](http://worldsinablender.com/category/star-trek/) for... commenting just enough to let me know he'd read it, I guess? And for not calling me insane to my face. Which is the best one can expect from a Methods of Rationality fan. Or maybe he just figured plutoplex had, very politely, taken care of that. :D
> 
> Caution: This may not be going where you think. If you did know it was going there, I love you, you crazy person!

 Dobby tells Harry that he enters Our Hero’s story as the brave, downtrodden slave of Lucius Malfoy, a bad master he hates and fears and who treats him very badly.  He looks and behaves as if he is. Lucius also looks and behaves as though Dobby’s story is true.

Dobby is not the only house elf we know.

Dobby’s story has enough holes you could fly a Quidditch team through it.

Let’s kick off.

 

**A hatstall?**

Dobby shows us in canon that he’s a cunning and manipulative dissembler.  He drops hints to Harry about how terrible his situation is. Harry Potter is so wonderful!  Nothing is expected of him but to take care of himself, but here’s a person in front of him, already suffering terribly, risking even more trouble for his sake...

Who else have we seen pull the It’s Entirely Your Decision But A Good Person Like You Will Naturally Do The Right Thing gambit?  Hint: he’s everybody’s boss and dresses like somebody put his name through a prism. *

This isn’t Dobby’s only introductory manipulation, though. He confesses  to all the trouble he made so _caringly,_  to a kid who’s very vulnerable to caring.  Let’s note that at this point the Dursleys haven’t yet put Dudley on a diet, so the only time Harry’s seen the I’m Doing This For Your Own Good manipulation is when Hermione used it on Neville. Harry’s opinion was that Hermione was not only justified but correct.*

Then there’s that piece of sophistry about how, when at school, He Who Must Not Be Named could be named freely.  Betraying Lucius’s secrets to Harry not terribly subtly, in that final CoS confrontation, wasn’t very elvish of Dobby if we take things on their face.

Is it Gryffindor to betray someone from your circle who doesn’t deserve your loyalty?  Sort of. We’ve seen and heard about Sirius, Remus, and Ron turning away from friends who they believed had proved unworthy, and even the people who have problems with this behavior don’t express that these fair-weather friends are bad Gryffindors.  Gryffindor is about idealism, and so even if you’ve been friends with someone who’s failed, your loyalty is better given to someone more worthy. So we can’t rule out Gryffindor for Dobby based on his not being loyal to someone his species thinks he should be loyal to but who we see treat him like dirt.

However, Gryffindor is about idealism, and disloyalty does make them uneasy, even if it’s not taboo as it is for Hufflepuffs.  A Gryffindor can accept an instance of treachery if they can come to understand how it was brave and justified.

If a Slytherin can’t cut unfortunate ties in order to improve their own circumstances or make the world better, they need to go home.

Misleading without lying is a cut above that, as Slytherin techniques go.  And, like the Carrot Ironfoundersson Good People Do Good technique, it’s the go-to for an HPverse character who is a major player in both wars.

If there’s one thing we know about house elves, it’s that they are, as a culture and maybe even as a species, Hufflepuffs.  Dobby is not an exception to that. He shows himself deeply loyal, once his loyalty is given. He may be an outlier and _extremely_ weird by elf standards, but they don’t treat him like an out-of-control psychopath.  And yet, when he bad-mouths and sabotages the Malfoys he only acts guilty: as though he’s broken a rule and must be judged and punished.  He doesn’t seem conflicted about what he’s doing. He doesn’t seem _ashamed._

  * Also Captain Carrot.  But Albus is pretty good at it, too.

  * In PS/SS: Through The Trapdoor



 

**The curious incident of the snake in the corridor**

  
Lucius’s reaction to losing Dobby was… to fail at assaulting Harry, who had just done Dobby a life-debt sized favor, right down the hall from Dumbledore’s office in a building where a former Slytherin knows perfectly well the walls have eyes.  And he confirmed what Harry had done without making any verbal threats about the future.

Really strong dissuasion against future interference there, Luke.

Devil’s advocate argument: this leaves him free to _actually_ plot about Harry’s future without alerting Dobby. Dobby, who’s implied he’d been with the Malfoys at least since the first Riddle War. Restraint wouldn’t really help him there: Dobby knows what he’s like.

But either way, as an effort to make Harry feel sorry or afraid, as opposed to extremely pleased with his own clever heroism, Lucius’s performance lacks something.

This leaves us with four possibilities:

  
1\. Lucius has an outburst because he’s an undisciplined idiot.  

The problem with his theory is that he never follows up as a undisciplined idiot with a narcissistic injury would, unless you count the DOM raid three years later.  It’s unlikely that an undisciplined person bent on vengeance would take that long to act. It is, of course, possible that Narcissa prevented him from acting.

 

2\. Lucius makes his outburst because he must be seen to protest against losing something, lest people think they can go ahead and take what’s his, but in this case he cares so little about the loss that he’s not interested in pursuing the matter unless he has to.

Only, if this was his reasoning, portraits would see him bluster and gossip to their families.  Lucius has survived in politics and war long enough that we should expect him to know that bluster isn’t dissuasive against Platonic Ideal Gryffindor paladins.  It just gets their backs up and makes them feel righteous. So families who had heard about his threat would know if he didn’t follow up: it’s impossible for him to save face if he makes a public display of displeasure and then lets it go.

If Lucius’s goal was to save face, he’d tell everyone he’d fired a disgraceful elf because he was sick of its incompetence.  If he wanted to really save face, and also mess with Harry’s head, he’d let Harry see him struggle not to look pleased about the sock and then start a rumor that Dobby is now spying on Harry for him.  

He might even have been able to get away with that with his peers, depending on whether the ritualistic flair to WInkey’s sacking was customary, necessary, or just Barty Crouch’s way of making sure his statement of uninvolvement with her actions was double-underlined.  After all, if elves could be freed as accidentally and carelessly as Dobby was, there’d be a lot more free elves—or just a lot more traumatized ones.

 

3\. Lucius is absolutely planning revenge but chooses not to say so in front of painted witnesses.

This problem here is that, if trying for subtle vengeance on Harry, he’d be an undisciplined idiot to let Draco conduct a very public feud with the child everyone is grateful to without being just as public about trying to stop that feud—if only for the sake of the family’s image.  One could make the argument that Lucius is simply failing to control his son while the boy is away at boarding school—but what we _see_ is that to the child Draco, Lucius is the _only_ authority, and what would disappoint or upset him must not be allowed to reach his ears.  Draco complains bitterly about Harry to Lucius’s face outside the safety of their home, so he’s not concerned that showing his animosity to Harry will make Daddy more disappointed with him than Hermione’s mere existence makes inevitable.

 

4\. Lucius blusters ineffectively because he’s on board with Harry going away from this encounter feeling proud and unworried and full of determination to keep doing heroic stuff because he’s good at it even when faced by scary, ill-tempered grownups.

It’s unclear why he would do that, but if you want to know what a Slytherin wanted to happen, look at what actually happened.  A competent Slytherin, anyway.  Judge Lucius as you will.

 

**There are house elves!?  Here! At Hogwarts?!**

Dobby can get in and out of the castle, no trouble.  It’s possible that all elves can do this and are just more discreet, but Harry never saw a shred of evidence that any of of his peers’ family elves were waiting on them.  We can certainly stipulate that he’s oblivious, elves try not to be seen, it could be different in the dungeons, and Neville The Humble was Harry's only roommate in a position to _have_ a family elf.

Still, six years and never one glimpse or whisper of any elves that don’t belong to Hogwarts?  Not one whisper of ‘I’ll send Nixie to Hogsmeade for butterbeer’? And Hermione The Would-Be-Emancipator, whose roommates are painted as Girly Shallow Giggling Middle School Stereotypes, has never heard a shred of gossip about students using their elves for mischief and assignations?  Even if there’s a taboo or social stigma that would have families forbidding their elves to attend upon their children at school, some teenagers find loopholes and some pureblood families think they’re above laws. And secrets mostly don’t stay secret at Hogwarts, regardless of what the twins may think.   As the man said, eliminate the improbable and all that will remain is that only Hogwarts elves can flit in and out of Hogwarts.* *

Albus agreeing to Dobby stalking Harry during the school, however, would be both a quite dramatic interpretation of his character and unlikely.  Even if, as many authors believe, he has no morals or empathy at all, his goals are _still_ at odds with Dobby’s.  Dobby’s stated and apparent goal is to keep Harry out of harm’s way, while Dumbledore intends that Harry should attend Hogwarts.  He _doesn’t_ expel Harry and Ron after they breach the Statute of Secrecy, when even Ron’s mum would have understood it not to be an overreaction.  He later spends major political capital to ensure Harry is at school and in training during term, more than once.

Whatever his reasons, he does not want Harry gone.  So Dobby is not coordinating with Dumbledore in CoS: he has some other reason to have access to the castle.

 

  * Kreacher, who at the Headmaster’s suggestion and invitation was sent to work there by his master Harry, became in some respects a Hogwarts elf.  It may or may not matter that Harry considers the castle his home.


  * For Valley readers:, if you think Albus didn’t know about and agree to Dobby waiting on the pregnant witches during the summer, you are kidding yourself.  If he wasn’t alerted by Severus or Poppy, he was by the portraits—and Severus would have expected that. Risky to allow it, absolutely, but Narcissa was practically on Albus’s ICW payroll by then.  Besides, any half-benevolent interpretation of him has to incorporate his giving-people-a-chance thing. It’s also possible that restrictions are looser during the summer.



 

**Pack animal tells peer pressure to go climb a tree.  In other news, man bites dog.**

If it’s as easy as all that to sock an elf without intending to, as a result of enemy trickery, we have to assume wizards not only do all their own laundry but lock up their clothes so that elves who want to get free don’t, for example, hover unnoticeably on top of the laundry basket and play catch-the-knickers.  We can assume Dobby’s profound wish to get free of ‘his’ family is unique, but in that case it’s an anomaly that needs to be explained:

Dobby’s feelings about freedom aren’t just unusual: according to the evidence we’ve been given, they _are_ unique.  Other elves find the idea unthinkable, or awful.  Why is he so special, not to feel threatened by freedom?  And where did he pick up the idea that freedom is valuable and desirable, that an elf can value and desire it without shame?  He knows this is abnormal in his race-and-culture. He quickly backs away from being asked to represent the point of view that some elves might want it.  

If he’s not misrepresenting himself in some way, how did he come to be so clear that it’s OK to have agency and be different?  This would be a natural assumption for a late 20th century Western muggle (at least to a point, depending on the demographics), but nothing we’ve seen about any other house elves tells us that this point of view is remotely normal or acceptable to them.

Dobby isn’t isolated, like the prisoner-in-solitary Kreacher has become by canon-era.  He’s enthusiastically extroverted, and elves aren’t _by default_ prevented from communicating with each other, maybe not even from socializing. Winky knew Dobby well enough, when they both belonged to families with a lot to guard.  

After Dobby was freed she said that he had changed in ways that worried her—not that he was a bad elf.  Working at Hogwarts, he gets along with other elves even when he doesn’t really fit with them and knows they disapprove of his loudly-stated views.  He’s friendly and one-of-them enough that, despite their disapproval of his freedom, they don’t avoid him like they do a drunk Winky who isn’t doing her job.

So he has plenty of exposure to other elves; he isn’t free to develop his defiant views without risking pushback.  Through Winky we see elves feel shame, and Dobby signals that he’s not immune to it: he doesn’t just punish himself for breaking elvish taboos/rules, he calls himself bad.

I’m not saying he actually feels shame for saying bad things about the family he says he belongs to.  His affect is more I-will-enthusiastically-do-what’s-expected-of-me than I-feel-bad-about-myself. But when he calls himself bad rather than saying he did a bad thing, he’s telling us that this is what he thinks he’s supposed to feel when he does something wrong.

But despite a world of negative feedback, he doesn’t think he’s bad _for wanting to be his own person._  He knows his whole culture disagrees, and he doesn’t pick fights about it, but he doesn’t worry that he’s _wrong_.  

I don’t want to take away from how amazing he is if he got to that place all on his own, with just some acceptance from Harry. Frankly, though. the reason that’s so _strikingly_ amazing, as opposed to simply admirable, is that it’s deeply unlikely that he became so confident on that point solely due to passive support from some kid, even a hero of his, who has no short-term power over his circumstances and who he sees maybe once a year.

  
 

**If black is white, the film is negative**

Even the most rule-rejecting Weasleys knew how unlikely it was that an elf would work against his owner.  Dobby didn’t just present himself as working against Lucius’s interests, he fingered Lucius, once accused of being a Death Eater, for the near-death of the pureblooded minor daughter of a liberal Ministry official in front of the liberal head of the Wizengamot.  

If it’s even magically possible for an elf to willfully betray his owner, pensieve evidence would have made this treachery and its immediate self-punishment unambiguous to the Department of Regulation And Control Of Magical Creatures.  Winky said that a freed Dobby is vulnerable to that department: Lucius didn’t have to let Dobby just waltz happily off to his freedom without registering a complaint. Lucius gets things done at the Ministry, when he feels like it.

 

**Pack animal resists internalizing opinions that prevail in his environment.  In other news, frog bites dragon.**

Even if Dobby was working against his owner, how the heck does a servant in that house come to think so highly of Harry?  I’ll grant you Draco disliking him was probably a point in favor, but Dobby’s values generally align with Dumbledore’s folks. Which is unexpected in itself, unless Dobby’s formative years revolved around some much more moral master than the Malfoys, who gave or sold him to them anyway.

One possible explanation is that Dobby bought Lucius’s claims of having been vilely Imperiused by his dread enemy Voldemort and thank goodness for the sainted Potter child.  For this to be the case, we would have to assume that Lucius kept it up in his own home. For _that_ to be the case, we would have to assume that Lucius is extremely paranoid and disciplined.  Some versions of fanon-Lucius are: canon-Lucius does not display these traits.

 

**(Speaking of Malfoys:**

Do we have any evidence that their hot-tempered, indiscreet, spoiled, entitled kid is aware that Daddy lost their elf?  Or, for that matter, that Dobby even exists? I expect Narcissa to refrain from bringing up in public an incident where her family lost face.  Draco airs his grievances.)

 

**A question of access**

Even if you answer the prevailing-opinions question with ‘Dobby’s been brainwashed by the WWN fawning over the Boy Who Lived,’ how the _hell_ did Dobby know where Harry lived?  It took Kreacher three days to find Mundungus Fletcher, who had been in Kreacher’s house on multiple occasions, so house elves can’t just _go_ to anyone you tell them to go to. At least, things can interfere.  

The Evans-blood protection (which might not have been a barrier to an elf with good intentions, even one from a DE family) is the only real protection the Dursley’s have that we know about—except for secrecy.  How did Dobby find out the Dursleys’ address, living with Malfoys in Malfoy Manor? Harry was left strictly alone except for the occasional fan encounter as a child. Nobody outside of his family noticeably creeped on him, tried to warp his mind, or tried to hurt him away from the house.  Even once he was at school, his magical encounters consisted of Mrs. Figg as a neighbor (not very magical), Dobby and owls in his house, and dementors in his neighborhood.

We have no evidence that any wizards but Hagrid, Minerva and Albus knew where he lived until Dobby did the thing with the violet pudding and the Ministry got an alert.   His general vicinity, yes—not his address. Hagrid is loose-lipped, but no one knew he was ever at Privet Drive to try to get information out of him.  And, in fact, he _was_ never there.

And we know Albus didn’t put the Dursley’s address under a Fidelius charm, because Dobby got in.  Meaning: if houses so protected can be entered by elves who aren’t specifically permitted in, it’s a useless spell. In which case, a Potter-loyal elf-raised pureblood like Sirius should have known Fidelius was useless and refused to let James and Lily rely on it.  Sirius thought they’d be safe as long as there was a decoy: he didn’t have a problem with the spell itself.

The contrast between two elves (one of whom was Dobby) taking several days to track down Mundungus and Dobby having no apparent trouble stopping Harry’s owls and getting into the house when he felt like it wants explaining.

 

**A further question of access**

Dobby didn’t just know where Harry lives, but got close enough to steal his mail and eventually get inside the house.   We don’t know he _did_ spend any great length of time watching how the Dursleys operated, but we know he was capable of it.

We know, in fact, that the Evans-blood ward doesn’t keep him out.  This is hard to address since the rules of that ward were were never clearly given, but it’s undeniably weird that the elf of a DE family that wishes Harry harm can get inside and talk to the kid.  The go-to explanation is that Dobby himself is not a Death Eater and has no malice for Harry.

This will do, so long as you think, like Hermione, that elves are human-like entities that are culturally subjugated, brainwashed, and enslaved.  But what do we really know about elves?

Let’s take Dobby out of the picture for a second; obviously the whole point of this is to put a different interpretation on his far-end-of-the-bell-curve behavior.

CEWAND (Canon elves who are not Dobby) aren’t insulted or pleased by the idea of clothes and freedom, as hobs in stories are.  Winky _fears_ freedom. When transplanted away from the household she considers herself a part of, she does not thrive. Kreacher, left alone in Grimmauld place with no humans to serve and no apparent means of feeding himself anything humans would recognize as food, stays put for anywhere up to twelve years.  Why didn’t he go live with another Black? Narcissa had a huge house that could probably have absorbed an extra servant. For that matter, if elves can go everywhere, why didn’t he rescue Bella?*

It’s unclear to what extent elves elves are bound to their house vs. its family, but canon very strongly suggests that elves are _not_ short, brainwashed humans.  They have a magical connection to some aspect of their hearth or home or family.  Is allegiance something that can be magically accounted for? That’s not discussed in canon, and we can’t get a solid answer to this issue based on the information in the books.*  We can notice, however, that if the wards only keep out people who are Marked or under Imperius, it’s profoundly useless.  If the wards only keep out people who are tainted by dark magic or personally intend Harry harm, getting around them is the easiest thing in the world:

Convince a muggle from Child Services that something is wrong in that house.  Harry is labeled by his family as a bullier of his cousin, who is larger, stronger, has peer support Harry lacks, and can be observed chasing Harry rather than being chased by him.  This alone could start the questions being asked without any magical persuasion, if spun competently.

One glance at the one-child photo gallery on the walls would confirm that something is very wrong at #4, and, as many fics have illustrated, throughout Harry’s muggle school years there is the physical evidence of the cupboard.

As Whitehound has pointed out, the cupboard may not be as small as many assume, but come on, there’s a mostly-unused guestroom and a spare bedroom that’s in use as a rubbish bin.  Even if the room itself isn’t physically torturous, it’s set apart from the rest of the family (and the bathroom), only semi-private (especially in movie-verse, with a peephole one would not expect in a closet), it locks from the outside, and an occupant would be disturbed every time anybody came up and down the stairs.  It is also canonically infested with spiders and not furnished or lit to the standards of the rest of the house.

Even if it’s not intrinsically too small for a child’s comfort, it is clear evidence that Harry’s family does not want him near them and is not interested in his happiness or well-being.  As described, this living space is solid evidence that Harry should not be allowed to remain in that house. If only the Dursleys' charming natures and a ward that works against dark magic keep people away from Harry, a legitimately concerned muggle with the authority to do so would be very likely to remove him, probably with his enthusiastic consent, to a place where he can be more easily kidnapped.  

It would have been easier to do this without outraging the Statute of Secrecy in the 1980s when Harry was little than at the time of writing (2018); security and information-tracking were far less advanced and some spells to lay confusion would have done the trick.  Or some toughs/werewolves hired to intercept the Child Services worker. Whichever.

I’m not saying the Evans-blood wards _necessarily_ prevented this from happening in anon, but he did, canonically get no help.  Harry’s teachers were awfully gullible and blind about him. We can certainly blame Dumbledore for that, as many do.  

We could also reasonably conclude that the protections around Petunia’s home aren’t working on such simple rules that someone attached to a family that hates Harry can just come right into the house.  Or, at least, not without creating some kind of a fuss that would alarm the neighbors or alert some (probably magical) entity Lily would have expected to be on Harry’s side.

  * Probably either because Azkaban specifically accounts for elves or because Walburga was old enough to have seen Riddle at Hogwarts, know who he was, and be disgusted that her family’s children were following a mudblood, tbh.  But Lucius disavowed Voldemort, so she could probably have reconciled herself to letting her family’s legacy revert to Narcissa, depending on how rational she was and when.


  * No doubt Pottermore is a very useful resource, but as it can be and has been retconned, it is internally fluid and so cannot be relied upon as foundational canon.



 

**I’m sorry you feel that way.**

Dobby thinks it’s fine to hurt someone you’re protecting, as long as they don’t die.  He might feel badly about it, but he won’t be _sorry,_ he doesn’t apologize.  Easily explained, as Dobby’s life in presented in canon has been one in which pain is just an expected unpleasantness that you live with.  However, it’s an attitude about protection that becomes a little more striking when you consider

 

**The question of motive:**

Dobby’s protection was triggered because he desperately wanted to get Harry out of school and keep him out while dangerous things were going on.

Do we know of anyone

* connected to the Malfoys  
* with some knowledge of Harry’s bio-family  
* who might plausibly know how to navigate a muggle telephone directory and find them  
* who’s good at getting information and keeping it need-to-know  
* and successfully misleads a lot without saying untrue things (don’t @ me, kappas)  
* who’s a bit ruthless when it comes to causing others survivable (emotional) pain with the intention that they should learn something (which is to say: for their own good)  
* who has cause to resent unbreakable bonds  
* and opposes the Dark Lord  
* who has rejected and risen above the limits purebloods think someone of their blood/class/race should be bound by  
* and belongs to a group that claims ambition as a core value  
* who’s hung up on protecting Harry, and  
* has indicated he’d like to see Harry expelled (i.e.: out of the castle) about fifty gazillion times during the two years where the castle was hosting a perilous magical object sought or controlled by the one entity such a person wouldn’t dare openly oppose?

For the record, I don’t think Snape wanted Harry expelled, except maybe for a minute during the Swelling Solution incident. Harry would then be away from his protection, to say nothing of what Lily would think about Harry losing the choice between worlds that he was born with.

I don’t think he even seriously wanted Harry to think it might happen: using a major threat when it’s demonstrably off the table diminishes both its power and one’s own intimidation factor.  Having survived as a teacher for over ten years, and house mother for the sneakiest population in the castle for up to the same length of time, we can be fairly confident that Snape isn’t dumb enough to pull out his biggest gun and then prove it’s a leaky Supersoaker with no notable water pressure.

Not by accident.  Being that incompetent at behavior control but having the kind of control of his classroom Snape has, where half the class hates him but the only kid who acts out without a damn good reason thinks himself generally untouchable and has reason to feel he has special privileges? No. Inconsistent.  Something else is going on.

I do think Harry safe and _elsewhere_ , not meddling in dangerous adult business (you shouldn’t be inside on a day like this, people will think you’re up to something) was a lovely stress-relief fantasy for him.  It probably involved vindictively dull but useful nonfiction, all the stale bread and nourishing gruel a boy could wish for, and Harry being shackled to a comfortable armchair.  We know he wouldn't shut up about getting Harry out of Hogwarts for two years straight.

In public.  With Christmas Is Cancelled And No Final Exams For Hermione levels of bitter-and-sadfaced mugging.  Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?

How good are elves at distinguishing between Master is Venting and Master Is Giving Me A Chance To Anticipate His Orders?

Let me be clear, for those who are coming to this piece as a one-shot rather than as a set of really excessive author’s notes.  I’m not saying that Dobby has been influenced by the Malfoy’s friend Snape, who has secretly taken the extreme risk of convincing a slave to admire and wish to protect his master’s enemies.  I’m saying Dobby was working for Snape all through canon.

We don’t need that to explain everything: quite a lot of Dobby’s actions, like risking and ultimately losing his life, are neatly answered when we accept that Dobby genuinely loved and honored Harry.  But there are a number of questions it on which it ties a very neat bow.

Why didn’t Dobby feel bad about being a bad Malfoy elf?  He wasn’t one.

Why was a Malfoy elf able to get into Harry’s room?  A Malfoy elf wasn’t.

Why didn’t Draco resent his father’s servant being stolen?   _What_ servant?

Why didn’t Lucius take timely vengeance for losing a valuable tool?  Maybe he was scared of Albus. Or maybe he was he was on board with his ally’s plan.  Or maybe there was mind-magic involved.

Why was Dobby alerted when a kid who didn’t own him called for him?  He’d been put on call.

Why did Dobby think Harry is great and precious?  Snape has made Dobby think so, because he wants Lily’s brat kept safer than he can manage in his politically-mandated role of vicious and beloathed antagonist.

This premise resolves issues left unaddressed by the popular Dobby Decided To Serve The Boy Who Was Nice To Him theory, but it doesn’t have a baked-in explanation for why Lucius behaved as though Dobby was his servant at the end of CoS. Expand this question to ask why he implicitly agreed he’d loosed the diary, explicity claimed Dobby, and brought an annoying elf who apparently needs constant correction to Hogwarts for a confrontation despite not bringing him before, and it does get tricky.  We’ll have to let that tangle be answered by fiction.

(On which note, I now return you, if that’s how you got here, to [your irregularly-scheduled monster-story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11661429/chapters/40358054).)

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading through to the end. If you know of stories that have done this, or meta that's dealt with similar subjects, I'd love some links!


End file.
